Cameras, including video cameras, have become ubiquitous in today's society. With the introduction of cameras into mobile phones, and the explosion of social media applications with which one can share content, consumers have effectively become real-time producers of content for the world to see. Applications such as Snapchat, Instagram, and others use user-generated content such as pictures and video as a basis for messages “stories” that are shared among the application community.
To attract and retain users, these applications must continually add new features and effects. Certain effects, such as combining and manipulating video content, recognizing humans, and manipulating the images, however can introduce computationally intensive processing requirements, and, in many cases, result in poor quality. Moreover, these features face a steep adoption curve if they are not simple to use and work quickly (and with minimal power drain) within the constraints of mobile device computing resources.